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A Bloody Tragedy

Nashville Globe – February 22, 1908

Renda Dilliard Kills Mollie Thompson – They Were Rivals For White Man’s Blandishments — The bloody sequel of the love affair between these two young negro women and their white paramour should be warning to those similarly involved.

The common saying, when there is a tragic difficulty between men, that a woman is at the bottom of it, is reversed in the tragedy enacted in the alley back of Seventeenth avenue, between State and Patterson streets, Sunday night, Feb 17, by Renda Dilliard and Mollie Thompson. The cause of this fatal encounter, it is said, was a white man. He was playing court to these two dusky damsels and this double dealing on his part when discovered aroused the green-eyed monster, jealousy, which had its tragic sequel in the death of the rascal’s paramours Sunday night….